Call centers and other customer service centers typically distribute telephone calls and other types of communications to available service agents in accordance with various predetermined criteria, such as an arrival order, the nature of the call, a predefined quality of service status or another customer rating. It is becoming increasingly important that call centers be able to provide an appropriate level of customer contact treatment based upon the relationship and value a particular customer has to the business. Many customers choose alternate forms of contact into a business, particularly web-based contact over the Internet or another Internet Protocol (IP) network Businesses are looking to support their customer segmentation strategies regardless of the form of contact a customer may choose to obtain service. Thus, companies should be able to provide the best agent resource for a given customer regardless of how the customer chooses to access the call center.
In order to determine an appropriate customer treatment for received communications, a call center typically identifies the caller and then and accesses information about the identified caller, for example, from a call center database. For example, a first business might have a priority relationship with a second business, whereby customers within the first business are accorded preferential treatment by the second business. The second business must automatically identify calls associated with the first business to determine an appropriate priority customer treatment.
In addition, for many business-to-business communications, customer information must often be passed to additional entities, such as supply chain partners, trading partners or subcontractors that handle customer service or technical support on behalf of another entity. Many businesses, however, are often reluctant to have their proprietary data transmitted over a network, especially when the ultimate recipient does not have an established relationship with the original customers.
A need therefore exists for improved methods and apparatus for providing customer information over a network to a call center or another entity.